Accuracy of NBA Mock Drafts in 2012, Best, Worst

04Jul

NBA Draft 2012 is in the books so it’s time for a lot of grading… no, I don’t mean judging teams or drafted players because it’s too early but there’s one draft-related topic which doesn’t require waiting few years:Who Had The Best and Worst 2012 Mock Drafts on the Internet?

After humble beginnings last season I expanded my efforts to 122 NBA Mock Drafts this year.
Obviously, it doesn’t mean I covered every mock available on the web but I think I was close ;-)

Seriously speaking though here’s what I did:
1) after the draft lottery I saved on my hard drive pages from as many 1st round mocks as I could quickly gather. Mostly from widely known authors/sources but I also added many googled ones.
I repeated this exercise weekly up to the day before actual NBA Draft when I had a final push for the data.

There are two important notes here:
a) because I tried to capture content which was quickly changing some of the links provided won’t work. The most extreme example was probably with Chad Ford from ESPN who published 10 mock drafts and the last 3 or 4 had multiple “updates” which by the way block the entry to original versions.
I could just upload those saved files but that probably wouldn’t be legal so I just posted a PDF file with every pick of every mock I’ve processed.
b) I included 3 mocks from the day of the draft from [my guess at] 3 most popular sources but I don’t feel great about it. On a draft day rumors from teams, possible leaks and updates are so rampant that I question the value of those mocks for 10 minutes… especially when at this point you can just wait for the real event.

2) I graded every mock by an average absolute difference between the mocked and actual picks
For example Bradley Beal was drafted third so if you had him at #2 you would get a score of “1” but if you had him at #5 you would get a score of “2”. Got it? If a player went undrafted I counted that as a “30” because of the entire second round. I did the aforementioned thing for every pick in every mock and calculate an average for the entire first round so the lower the number the more accurate mock was.

Is this unbelievable or what? The same guy – David Kay – had the most accurate mock 2 years in a row??? I mean seriously, what’s going on here?? Have I made mistake?
Was I bribed and I don’t know anything about it??? ;-)

What makes this situation even more strange is that the page with “winning” mock doesn’t exist anymore and I have no idea why… so here’s a saved file [please rename the extension to “.html”, I edited background to white because it was black and unreadable in a raw form].

You could argue a first place for Chad Ford because of the tie in average error and an earlier date… but he had a lot of later versions – which were worse – which IMHO hurt his cause and he would have to settle for the second place if it were up to me. Not that’s a bad thing ;-)

Third place would be some kind of tie between Scott Howard-Cooper, myNBAdraft.com, sportscity.com, Sam Amick and draftexpress.com.

Congratulations to all winners and to all of us for the great coverage of NBA Draft 2012!

Earlier versions were even worse mostly because they included players who stayed in college.

Surprisingly even though there are many possible combinations there were TWO instances were mocks were identical. I don’t want to excuse anybody of copy and paste because it’s hardly a damning evidence so I’ll just assume that some authors publish on different sites at the same time.

Everybody had Anthony Davis at #1 but nobody had a 1st round mock with Jeremy Lamb at #12 or Evan Fournier at #20 or Jared Cunningham at #24 or Arnett Moultrie at #27 or Perry Jones at #28.
Jared Cunningham appeared only in 3 mocks!

Also I think it’s worth noting that Tim T from thetruefansports was the only one with Dion Waiters at #4, another blogger – Jonathan Carrano from sportsbyblayze – was the only one to nail Terrence Ross at #8 and Jeff Lenchiner from insidehoops.com was the exception with John Jenkins at #23.